Don Quixote tilting against windmills on the long-suffering Rosinante,
trying to save damsels in distress from imaginary ogres; or me jousting
with an exclusive environment on my battered wheelchair to try and give
people with disabilities a fighting chance. Who is crazier?

Saturday, 17 August 2013

On
a muggy monsoon evening in a tiny village in Haryana,
16-year-oldManju,
her voice steady and clear, recounts the story of the day she wasraped.
It is a story that in its horrifying essentials can be heard in villages
across the state, across, for that matter, the country. On 6 August
2012, Manju, a Dalit from Kalsi village in Karnal district, was waylaid
on her way to school. Two men, Ajay and Krishen, from the upper-caste
Rod community, allegedly forced her into their car and took turns
to rape her. Warning her to hold her tongue, they dumped her near her
school.

It
took Manju two weeks to admit to her mother that she had been raped.Her
mother already knew. A neighbour implicated in the crime allegedly gloated
about her role in the rape, gloated about Manju’s lost honour. Manju’s
mother was steadfast in her support for her daughter. Accounts differ
about who said what but the upshot is that less than a month after the
gangrape, Manju’s mother disappeared.

On
3 September, her body was found in a ditch next to a small canal thatruns
by the village. Like her daughter, she too had been gangraped. Her murderers, allegedly her daughter’s rapists, had thrown acid on her and strangled
her with her own chunni.

(a)
engage in or employ for or permit to be engaged in or employed for
any other person for manually carrying human excreta; or

(b)
construct or maintain a dry latrine.

But
the Act leaves the implementation up to individual states and leaves
all kinds of loopholes by virtue of which this inhuman practice
continues today – with the Indian railways being one of the biggest offenders.

(c)

The
Supreme Court on Tuesday expressed serious concern at the inordinate
delay in Parliament passing the Prohibition of Employment as Manual
Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Bill. A Bench of Justices H.L.
Datu and Ranjan Gogoi shared the concern of counsel Santosh Paul and
counsel Meera Mathew, appearing for A. Narayanan, and told
Attorney-General G.E.Vahanvati:
“We are very much concerned about this issue.”

The
Bench said: “they [manual scavengers] are marginalised and
Parliament needs to take adequate steps to pass the Bill. It had been
over a year and half that the Additional Solicitor-General has been
promising to do something. We need a proper reply.”

- The Hindu
January 8, 2013, New Delhi

And
yet....

`Manhole'
deaths never seem to end

A
civic sanitary worker, Gangadhar, died inside a sewer line, after
getting into it through a manhole on Tilak Road here on Friday.

Though
the exact cause of death will be known once the post mortem report is
out, initial indications are that that he died of suffocation as he
inhaled poisonous gases inside the sewer line. The police and civic
workers retrieved the body after strenuous efforts for over an hour.

- The
Hindu, June 22, 2013, Thirupathi,

Our
collective crime and shame is that it is always the Dalits whom our people
subject to the special violence/indignities such as (a)-(c).

Wednesday, 14 August 2013

At
the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will
awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in
history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends,
and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.

It
is fitting that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of
dedication to the service of India and her people and to the still
larger cause of humanity.

- Pandit
Jawaharlal Nehru (from the ramparts of Red Fort)

1995:

The People with
Disabilities (PWD) Act is enshrined in our law books and promises all
sorts of wonderful things – on paper.

2006:

It
will be ensured that every child with disability has access to
appropriate pre-school, primary and secondary level education by
2020.

- National
Policy for Persons with Disabilities

On
the other hand .......

August
6, 2001:

In a horrific incident at Erwadi, near Ramanathapuram, 25
people including 11 women were charred to death. A devastating fire
broke out at 5 am, in the thatched hostel housing them. Out of the 46
hostel inmates, 40 were chained to their beds. They kept screaming
for help but no one came to their rescue. The 46 hostel inmates
were mentally ill. Erwadi is considered a holy place and has a
Dargah. People from various parts of the country brought their loved
ones to this place in the belief that the Dargah here had magical
powers to cure mental illness. During the course of the 'treatment',
these persons with mental illness were frequently caned, whipped and
beaten up in the name of 'driving away the evil'. During the day,
they were tied to trees with thick ropes. At night, they were tied to
their beds with iron chains.

April
20, 2012:

Jeeja
Ghosh, an academic waiting in her plane for it to take-off to Pune
where she has been invited for a conference, is made to deboard the
plane, because the pilot feels she will be a threat to `his
passengers' – on account of her cerebral palsy!

July
2013:

Vice-Chancellor
of Indira
Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) plans to shut down the Indian Sign
Language Research and Training Centre (ISLRTC) for the
hearing-impaired.

30
million Indians live under house arrest in their home-land because
being disabled in India could mean:

Not
leaving your house because pavements are not accessible if you are
on crutches, impossible on wheelchairs, and dangerous if you are
visually impaired.

Oh
and if you somehow manage to cross the road, public transport could
pose an insurmountable barrier.

Only
a few lucky children can afford to make their way to an inclusive
school.....if it exists.

Being
barred from voting. Or starting a bank account. Or marrying. Or
making any decision on your own (assuming you had a choice).

Not
being free to pursue education of your choice or being excluded from
jobs because workplaces aren't properly designed.

From
what Google and Wikipedia tell me, the populations of Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore together
amounted, at the time of the census of 2011, to less than 30 million. I wonder what our new boss of RBI, or any right thinking human being, would think of the consequences of voluntarily keeping a task-force, the size of Chennai, Bangalore and
Mumbai put together, under house arrest for 66 years and God knows how many more!

Thursday, 8 August 2013

Not
too long ago, I was adamant that I would not join Facebook and other
such sites, and cited fear of loss of privacy as the reason. A little
less long ago, Shefali, a reader of my blog who used to comment
sympathetically on many of my posts, convinced me that the best way
to get the message across was facebook + blog. She helped create an
account for me and got me started, and it has not taken me long to
discover that Shefali knew what she was talking about.

Here
are few reasons for my complete turnaround from anti-fb to pro-fb:

The
recent (Snowden-related) furore in the US has convinced me that any
fond imaginings of `one's privacy' are delusions of one who does not
notice how all such privacy evaporated with the onset of personal
computers and mobile phones. Within seconds, people can – if they
so desire - pinpoint where you are and what you are doing!

Recently,
a friend of mine `shared' a post in my blog on facebook, and on the
next day my blog probably saw the highest number of `hits' ever.

Today
I received an email saying You
shared your email with Sustainable Mobility and they've suggested
you like their page on Facebook; and
I most certainly do. (The organisation Samarthyam (see https://www.facebook.com/samarthyamindia) who is behind
this `Sustainable Mobility' was one of the first organisations I
learnt of who was seriously into making the environment accessible
and barrier-free; and they are clearly still doing a great job. Hats off, Anjlee!)

And
this is not the first time I have been put in touch with, or got to
hear of, attempts being made in the same direction as that of my blog
and related efforts.

So,
thank you Shefali for doing me this favour. (Incidentally, Shefali
herself does fantastic work with an organisation called Aarushi; the
reader who has never heard of it would be well-advised look up
Aarushi on the internet! (S)he has a heart-warming treat in store.)

Monday, 5 August 2013

If I can crib about drawbacks in facilities for PWD in the US and Canada (and of course, India), then I shouldn't leave out the people who tried to colonise almost all of the above. I was scheduled to fly British Air, with a two hour stop in London between the Toronto-London and London-Chennai legs of the looong return flight.I was dreading the Heathrow experience and as justification, to my friends, of this dread I could only mention the general air of confusion and inefficiency that has been the common denominator of all my prior visits to it. Let me try to put down on paper a rough approximation of how this dread was vindicated.To start with, the plane did not fly to what we in India call an aerobridge; instead, we halted on the tarmac, where a bus and staircase was waiting. So I walk down to the waiting bus `with a little help from my friends' and am informed that there will be a wheelchair waiting for me when I get off the bus. I suppose that was the hope. When we got there, there was no sight of a wheelchair. An Indian BA official there politely and diffidently asked me if I could please walk just a little more, which translated to about a 50m walk till we got to an elevator. That, fortunately, was almost the end of my forced exercise for the morning, because that's when we were met by the driver of a buggy with a no-nonsense Anthony-Quinn-look-alike who made no attempts to conceal his opinion of his organisation's mess-up and consequent ordeal I had been subjected to. He eventually drove the buggy into a large elevator which then took us to Level -4, meaning deep under the tarmac, and on getting out of the elevator, we must have driven what felt like about 1.5 km, then back up a similar elevator into the more peopled higher parts of the airport, where he left us at the next `pick-up point' where we spent a pleasant ten minutes or so, discussing the charms of Scotland with a lady who was from there, before another buggy came and took us to the desired gate almost an hour before boarding time. Then I had the bright idea of trying to use the available time for my morning ablutions. The problem was that I had been deposited at a spot from which I would need to walk about 50 m. to go to a toilet and my weary limbs would have none of it. Just then, almost as if by divine providence, a BA attendant (clearly Indian by appearance and accent). When he was requested to take me, he agreed and offered to wait for me to come out. As soon as I went in, I tried, unsuccessfully due to the number of plastic things which had to be opened, to brush my teeth with the little packet they give all fliers along with the earphones at the start of the flight. At this point, I noticed that my wheelchair attendant had come in and was glaring at me. When I asked him if he would help me open that tooth-paste - which was beyond my clumsy fingers - he blew up. `I thought you wanted to use the toilet; you can brush your teeth in the plane', and thus chastised, I was taken back to the gate. As we neared the gate, we heard them giving the boarding call and my man immediately perked up with `I'll take you to the plane; you have a good flight' this translating in any language to `time for you to tip me adequately'! I got into the plane, tipped him and looked forward to returning home, to `known devils'.

I got to thanking: what would I have done if my disability was more severe so that I couldn't even get out of the chair?

About Me

I am a professor of mathematics at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai (India). I have been increasingly mobility challenged of late due to the onset of a neurological condition known as multiple sclerosis; and perforce, I have had to notice the different ways that society excludes people like me, not deliberately, but for want of consciously thinking of the need for a more inclusive and accessible society.
Most of the posts here are a reproduction of articles from a column called `Different Strokes for Different Folks' which I wrote in the Times of India for a little more than a year from August 2011 until the powers that be decided that there were more pressing matters to be discussed on their pages.
I've written a bit more in the post 'Genesis of the Blog', which explains how this blog came into being.